Accidentally trapping sharks, seabirds, marine mammals, sea turtles and other animals in fishing gear is one of the biggest barriers to making fisheries more sustainable around the world. — sections of the ocean set aside to conserve biodiversity — are used, in part, to reduce the unintentional catch of such animals, among other conservation goals.

Many nations are of 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 from some or all types of exploitation, including fishing. Building off this proposal, a new analysis led by the 91̽�� looks at how effective fishing closures are at reducing accidental catch. Researchers found that permanent marine protected areas are a relatively inefficient way to protect marine biodiversity that is accidentally caught in fisheries. Dynamic ocean management — changing the pattern of closures as accidental catch hotspots shift — is much more effective. The were published online the week of Jan. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We hope this study will add to the growing movement away from permanently closed areas to encourage more dynamic ocean management,” said senior author , a professor at the 91̽��School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “Also, by showing the relative ineffectiveness of static areas, we hope it will make conservation advocates aware that permanent closed areas are much less effective in reducing accidental catch than changes in fishing methods.”

These techniques could include devices that keep sea turtles away from shrimp fishing, or streamer lines on boats to deter seabirds from getting caught in fishing lines.

The international team of researchers looked at 15 fisheries around the world — including Californian swordfish, South African tuna and Alaskan pollock — and modeled what would happen both to the targeted fish and to species caught accidentally, called bycatch, if 30% of fishing grounds were permanently closed, compared with dynamic management. In practice, dynamic management tracks real-time data of bycatch and closes smaller areas that can move year to year based on where species are most affected.

One of the critiques of permanent marine protected areas is that many of the species they are supposed to protect — marine mammals, turtles, seabirds — move around and may leave the protected area altogether. The study found that, on average for all fisheries studied, restricting fishing in 30% of a fixed area did reduce bycatch by about 16%. But in dynamic closed areas, over the same fraction of the ocean, bycatch was reduced by up to 57%.

“We found we can significantly reduce bycatch without decreasing the catch of target species by closing small fishing areas that can move year to year,” said lead author , an independent fisheries consultant based in Uruguay who completed this work as a 91̽��postdoctoral researcher. “This dynamic approach is increasingly valuable as climate change drives species and fisheries into new habitats, altering these interactions.”

The authors acknowledge that goals differ for various marine protected areas, and if the main purpose is to protect a critical habitat, a biodiversity hotspot or unique feature, static closures might be more effective and easier to enforce. In this way, all conservation goals should be broadly considered when determining which types of ocean protections to put in place, they said.

“I hope this study encourages everyone to consider how best to reduce bycatch and protect marine ecosystems,” Hilborn added.

A full list of co-author names and institutions is listed in the . No outside funding was used in this research.

For more information, contact Hilborn at rayh@uw.edu and Pons at mpons@uw.edu.

Fish populations tend to do better in places where rigorous fisheries management practices are used, and the more measures employed, the better for fish populations and food production, according to a new paper published Jan. 11 in Nature Sustainability.

The , led by of the 91̽��’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, draws upon the expertise of more than two dozen researchers from 17 regions around the world. The research team analyzed the management practices of nearly 300 fish populations to tease out patterns that lead to healthier fisheries across different locations. Their findings confirmed, through extensive data analysis, what many researchers have argued for several years.

“In general, we found that more management attention devoted to fisheries is leading to better outcomes for fish and shellfish populations,” Melnychuk said. “While this won’t be surprising to some, the novelty of this work was in assembling the data required and then using statistical tools to reveal this pattern across hundreds of marine populations.”

The research team used an international database that is the go-to scientific resource on the status of more than 600 individual fish populations. They chose to analyze 288 populations that generally are of value economically and represent a diversity of species and regions. They then looked over time at each fish population’s management practices and were able to draw these conclusions:

• In regions of the world where fish and shellfish populations are well studied, overall fisheries management intensity has steadily increased over the past half century
• As fisheries management measures are implemented, fishing pressure is usually reduced toward sustainable levels, and population abundance usually increases toward healthy targets
• If fish populations become depleted as a result of overfishing, a rebuilding plan may be implemented. These plans tend to immediately decrease fishing pressure and allow populations to recover
• If strong fisheries management systems are put in place early enough, then overfishing can be avoided and large, sustainable catches can be harvested annually, rendering emergency measures like rebuilding plans unnecessary

The study builds on previous work that found, by using the same database, that nearly half of the fish caught worldwide are from populations that are scientifically monitored and, on average, are increasing in abundance. The new paper takes a closer look at specific management actions and how they have impacted fishing pressure and the abundance of each population examined, Melnychuk explained.

“All fish populations have their own unique contexts that might dictate what management tools would be most helpful and promising to use,” he said. “Despite the great diversity in their management objectives and various strategies to meet those, we focused on key management tools in common to many fisheries around the world.”

The international research team chose to look at a spectrum of fish populations, such as hakes in South Africa and Europe, orange roughy in New Zealand, tuna species on the high seas, anchovies in South America and scallops off the Atlantic coast of North America. Most of the populations they examined had a history of being depleted at some point, usually due to historical overfishing.

For example, with U.S. mid-Atlantic population of black sea bass, a rebuilding plan instituted in 1996 brought fishing rates down from three times the sustainable level to below this mark, which led to a steady rebuilding of the fishery and full recovery by 2009.

“Fishers targeting black sea bass in the northeastern U.S. are finally reaping the rewards of harvest caps that allowed the population to rebuild,” said co-author of the University of Wisconsin—Madison. “The 2020 catch limit of more than 6,000 tons is the highest since catch limits were first imposed more than 20 years ago.”

This analysis omits fisheries that lack scientific estimates of population status, even though these account for a large amount of the world’s catch. These include most of the fish populations in South Asia and Southeast Asia — fisheries in India, Indonesia and China alone represent 30% to 40% of the world’s catch, most of which is essentially unassessed. Although fisheries in these regions could not be included in the analyses, the paper’s authors conclude that lessons learned can equally apply to data-limited fisheries: Greater investment in fisheries management systems is expected to lead to better outcomes for the fish populations upon which our fisheries are based.

Other 91̽��co-authors include , , , Maite Pons, Daniel Hively, Charmane Ashbrook, Nicole Baker and Ricardo Amoroso. A full list of paper co-authors is .

This research was funded by The Nature Conservancy, The Wildlife Conservation Society, the Walton Family Foundation and a consortium of Seattle fishing companies.

For more information, contact Melnychuk at mmel@uw.edu.

Nearly half of the fish caught worldwide are from stocks that are scientifically monitored and, on average, are increasing in abundance. Effective management appears to be the main reason these stocks are at sustainable levels or successfully rebuilding.

That is the main finding of an international project led by the 91̽�� to compile and analyze data from fisheries around the world. The were published Jan. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There is a narrative that fish stocks are declining around the world, that fisheries management is failing and we need new solutions — and it’s totally wrong,” said lead author , a professor in the 91̽��School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “Fish stocks are not all declining around the world. They are increasing in many places, and we already know how to solve problems through effective fisheries management.”

The project builds on a decade-long international collaboration to assemble estimates of the status of fish stocks — or distinct populations of fish — around the world. This information helps scientists and managers know where overfishing is occurring, or where some areas could support even more fishing. Now the team’s database includes information on nearly half of the world’s fish catch, up from about 20% represented in the last compilation in 2009.

“The key is, we want to know how well we are doing, where we need to improve, and what the problems are,” Hilborn said. “Given that most countries are trying to provide long-term sustainable yield of their fisheries, we want to know where we are overfishing, and where there is potential for more yield in places we’re not fully exploiting.”

Over the past decade, the research team built a network of collaborators in countries and regions throughout the world, inputting their data on valuable fish populations in places such as the Mediterranean, Peru, Chile, Russia, Japan and northwest Africa. Now about 880 fish stocks are included in the database, giving a much more comprehensive picture worldwide of the health and status of fish populations.

Still, most of the fish stocks in South Asia and Southeast Asia do not have scientific estimates of health and status available. Fisheries in India, Indonesia and China alone represent 30% to 40% of the world’s fish catch that is essentially unassessed.

“There are still big gaps in the data and these gaps are more difficult to fill,” said co-author , a principal scientist at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council and a member of The Nature Conservancy global board. “This is because the available information on smaller fisheries is more scattered, has not been standardized and is harder to collate, or because fisheries in many regions are not regularly monitored.”

Since the mid-1990s, catch has generally declined in proportion to decreases in fishing pressure for the fish stocks assessed in the database. By 2005, average biomass of fish stocks had started to increase.

The researchers paired information about fish stocks with recently published data on fisheries management activities in about 30 countries. This analysis found that more intense management led to healthy or improving fish stocks, while little to no management led to overfishing and poor stock status.

These results show that fisheries management works when applied, and the solution for sustaining fisheries around the world is implementing effective fisheries management, the authors explained.

“With the data we were able to assemble, we could test whether fisheries management allows stocks to recover. We found that, emphatically, the answer is yes,” said co-author , a professor of environmental and resource economics at University of California, Santa Barbara, and a board member with Environmental Defense Fund. “This really gives credibility to the fishery managers and governments around the world that are willing to take strong actions.”

Fisheries management should be tailored to fit the characteristics of the different fisheries and the needs of specific countries and regions for it to be successful. Approaches that have been effective in many large-scale industrial fisheries in developed countries cannot be expected to work for small-scale fisheries, especially in regions with limited economic and technical resources and weak governance systems, Parma said.

The main goal should be to reduce the total fishing pressure when it is too high, and find ways to incentivize fishing fleets to value healthy fish stocks.

“There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all management approach,” Costello said. “We need to design the way we manage fisheries so that fishermen around the world have a long-term stake in the health of the ocean.”

Other 91̽��co-authors are , and of the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. Other co-authors are from University of Victoria, University of Cape Town, National Institute of Fisheries Research (Morocco), Rutgers University, Seikai National Fisheries Research Institute Japan, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Fisheries New Zealand, Wildlife Conservation Society, Marine and Freshwater Research Center (Argentina), European Commission, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Center for the Study of Marine Systems, Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, The Nature Conservancy, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Hilborn and collaborators recently presented this work at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ in Rome.

The research was funded by the Science for Nature and People Partnership, a collaboration between the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara, The Nature Conservancy and Wildlife Conservation Society. Individual authors received funding from The Nature Conservancy, The Wildlife Conservation Society, the Walton Family Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, the Richard C. and Lois M. Worthington Endowed Professorship in Fisheries Management and donations from 12 fishing companies.

For more information, contact Hilborn at rayh@uw.edu, Parma at anaparma@gmail.com and Costello at costello@bren.ucsb.edu.

More information is available at , an effort to communicate the science, policies and human dimensions of sustainable fisheries.

About a quarter of the world’s seafood caught in the ocean comes from bottom trawling, a method that involves dragging a net along the ocean’s shelves and slopes to scoop up shrimp, cod, rockfish, sole and other kinds of bottom-dwelling fish and shellfish. The technique impacts these seafloor ecosystems, because other marine life and habitats can be killed or disturbed unintentionally as nets sweep across the seafloor.

Scientists agree that extensive bottom trawling can negatively affect marine ecosystems, but the central question — how much of the seafloor is trawled, or the so-called footprint of trawling — has been hard to nail down.

A new that uses high-resolution data for 24 ocean regions in Africa, Europe, North and South America and Australasia shows that 14 percent of the overall seafloor shallower than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) is trawled. Most trawl fishing happens in this depth range along continental shelves and slopes in the world’s oceans. The study focused on this depth range, covering an area of about 7.8 million square kilometers of ocean.

The , appearing online October 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brought together 57 scientists based in 22 countries, with expertise in mapping fishing activity from satellite monitoring and fishing logbook data. It shows that the footprint of bottom-trawl fishing on continental shelves and slopes across the world’s oceans often has been substantially overestimated.

“Trawling has been a very controversial activity, and its footprint has not been quantified for so many regions at a sufficiently high resolution,” said lead author , who completed the research as a 91̽�� postdoctoral researcher in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “When you don’t quantify the impacts of trawling at a fine scale, you end up with an overestimation of the trawling footprint.”

Previous analyses have mapped trawling on 1,000 or more square-kilometer grids, for example, compared with the 1- to 3-square-kilometer grids used in this analysis.

Footprint estimates presented in this new paper also are more accurate than those described in some previous studies because they use information about the gear used by fishing fleets, the authors explained. Knowing whether a trawling net spans 10 meters or 100 meters, for example, helps to improve the estimate of the seafloor area impacted.

While the authors found that 14 percent of the regions included in the study were trawled, there were major regional differences. For example, only 0.4 percent of the seafloor off South Chile is trawled, while more than 80 percent of the seafloor in the Adriatic Sea, a part of the Mediterranean Sea found to have the most intense footprint, is trawled.

Additionally, trawling footprints covered less than 10 percent of the seafloor area in Australian and New Zealand waters, and in the north Pacific’s Aleutian Islands, East Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, but exceeded 50 percent in some European seas.

The study also provided evidence for related environmental benefits. In regions where fishing rates for commercially fished trawl-caught stocks met accepted sustainability benchmarks, trawl footprints were usually smaller, explained co-author of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

“For those regions where bottom-trawling footprints were less than 10 percent of the seafloor area, fishing rates on bottom-dwelling fish stocks almost always met international sustainability benchmarks. But when footprints exceed 20 percent, they rarely met them,” Jennings said.

The authors acknowledge that some regions known to have a lot of trawling activity were not included in this study because data providing a detailed picture of fishing activity were not available. Southeast Asia is one of those regions.

Still, this new paper offers the most comprehensive look yet at trawling activity worldwide, explained co-author , a 91̽��professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. It also describes a way to estimate footprints from trawling in regions where gear dimensions, vessel speeds and total hours trawled are known, but that lack the vessel-specific location data now collected by some fleets.

“We are able to use this method to make reasonably good estimates of the impact of trawling in places where we don’t have fine-scale spatial data,” Hilborn said.

Other researchers involved with designing the study are Michel Kaiser of Bangor University in the United Kingdom and the Marine Stewardship Council; Roland Pitcher of CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere in Australia; Adriaan Rijnsdorp of Wageningen Marine Research in the Netherlands; Robert McConnaughey of NOAA Fisheries, Alaska Fisheries Science Center; Ana Parma of Centro Nacional Patagónico in Argentina; Petri Suuronen of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Natural Resources Institute Finland; Jeremy Collie of the University of Rhode Island; and Jan Hiddink of Bangor University. A full list of the co-authors is available in the paper.

This group is also evaluating the that live on the seafloor, and how changes experienced by these plants and animals .

This study was funded primarily by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. A full list of the additional funding sources is available in the paper.

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For more information, contact Amoroso at ramoroso@uw.edu and 206-747-1362 or on Skype at ricky.amoroso (Central Time) and Hilborn at rayh@uw.edu (Pacific Time).

Which food type is more environmentally costly to produce — livestock, farmed seafood, or wild-caught fish?

The answer is, it depends. But in general, industrial beef production and farmed catfish are the most taxing on the environment, while small, wild-caught fish and farmed mollusks like oysters, mussels and scallops have the lowest environmental impact, according to a new analysis.

The appears online June 11 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, and its authors believe it is the most comprehensive look at the environmental impacts of different types of animal protein production.

“From the consumer’s standpoint, choice matters,” said lead author , a 91̽�� professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “If you’re an environmentalist, what you eat makes a difference. We found there are obvious good choices, and really obvious bad choices.”

The study is based on nearly a decade of analysis, in which the co-authors reviewed hundreds of published life-cycle assessments for various types of animal protein production. Also called a “cradle-to-grave” analysis, these assessments look at environmental impacts associated with all stages of a product’s life.

Of the more than 300 such assessments that exist for animal food production, the authors selected 148 that were comprehensive and not considered too “boutique,” or specialized, to inform their new study.

As decisions are made about how food production expands through agricultural policies, trade agreements and environmental regulations, the authors note a “pressing need” for systematic comparisons of environmental costs across animal food types.

“I think this is one of the most important things I’ve ever done,” Hilborn said. “Policymakers need to be able to say, ‘There are certain food production types we need to encourage, and others we should discourage.'”

Broadly, the study uses four metrics as a way to compare environmental impacts across the many different types of animal food production, including farm-raised seafood (called aquaculture), livestock farming and seafood caught in the wild. The four measures are: energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, potential to contribute excess nutrients — such as fertilizer — to the environment, and the potential to emit substances that contribute to acid rain.

The researchers compared environmental impacts across food types by using a standard amount of 40 grams of protein — roughly the size of an average hamburger patty, and the daily recommended protein serving. For example, they calculated how much greenhouse gas was produced per 40 grams of protein across all food types, where data were available.

“This method gives us a really consistent measurement people can relate to,” Hilborn said.

The analysis showed clear winners that had low environmental impacts across all measures, including farmed shellfish and mollusks, and capture fisheries such as sardines, mackerel and herring. Other capture fish choices with relatively low impact are whitefish like pollock, hake and the cod family. Farmed salmon also performed well. But the study also illuminated striking differences across animal proteins, and the researchers advise that consumers must decide what environmental impacts are most important to them when selecting their food choices.

Some of the additional findings include:

• Overall, livestock production used less energy than most forms of seafood aquaculture. Farmed catfish, shrimp and tilapia used the most energy, mainly because constant water circulation must be powered by electricity.
• Catfish aquaculture and beef produce about 20 times more greenhouse gases than farmed mollusks, small capture fisheries, farmed salmon and chicken.
• Mollusk aquaculture — such as oysters, mussels and scallops — actually absorb excess nutrients that are harmful to ecosystems. In contrast, livestock beef production rated poorly in this measure, and capture fisheries consistently scored better than aquaculture and livestock because no fertilizer is used.
• Because livestock emit ammonia in their manure, and producing their feed requires burning fossil fuels, they performed poorly in the acid rain category. Farmed mollusks again performed the best, with small capture fisheries and salmon aquaculture close behind.
• For capture fisheries, fuel to power fishing boats is the biggest factor, and differences in fuel use created a large range of performance in the greenhouse gas category. Using a purse sein net to catch small schooling fish like herring and anchovy uses the least fuel and, perhaps surprisingly, pot fisheries for lobster use a great deal of fuel and thus have a high impact per unit of protein produced. Dragging nets through water, known as trawling, is quite variable and the impact appears to be related to the abundance of the fish. Healthy stocks take less fuel to capture.
• When compared to of vegetarian and vegan diets, a selective diet of aquaculture and wild capture fisheries has a lower environmental impact than either of the plant-based diets.

In the future, the researchers plan to look at biodiversity impacts as another way to measure environmental costs. The analysis also mentions a range of other environmental impacts such as water demand, pesticide use, antibiotic use and soil erosion that were addressed in some of the studies they reviewed, but not consistently enough to summarize in the study.

Co-authors are Jeannette Banobi, a former 91̽��research assistant in aquatic and fishery sciences; Teresa Pucylowski and Tim Walsworth, former 91̽��graduate students; and Stephen Hall of Avalerion Capital.

The study was partially funded by the Seafood Industry Research Fund.

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For more information, contact Hilborn at rayh@uw.edu.

An international group has taken a close look at how different types of bottom trawling affect the seabed. It finds that all trawling is not created equal — the most benign type removes 6 percent of the animal and plant life on the seabed each time the net passes, while the most other methods remove closer to a third. A 91̽�� professor is among the main authors on the , led by Bangor University in the U.K. and published July 17 in the .

The meta-analysis looks at 70 previous studies of bottom trawling, most in the Eastern U.S. and Western Europe. It looks across those studies to compare the effects on the seabed of four techniques: , a common method that uses two “doors” towed vertically in the water or along the bottom to hold the net open; , which hold the net open with a heavy metal beam; , which drag a flat or toothed metal bar directly along the seafloor; and , which use water to loosen the seabed and collect animals that live in the sediment.

“We found that otter trawls penetrated the seabed 2.4 cm (0.94 inches) on average and caused the least amount of depletion of marine organisms, removing 6 percent of biota per trawl pass on the seabed,” first author at Bangor University said in a . “In contrast, we found that hydraulic dredges penetrated the seabed 16.1 cm (6.3 inches) on average and caused the greatest depletion, removing 41 percent of the biota per fishing pass.”

Depending on the type of fishing gear, penetration depth and environmental variables such as water depth and sediment composition, it took from 1.9 to 6.4 years for the seabed biota, or marine plants and animals, to recover.

“These findings fill an essential science gap that will inform policy and management strategies for sustainable fishing practices by enabling us to evaluate the trade-off between fish production for food, and the environmental cost of different harvesting techniques,” said , a 91̽��fisheries professor and one of four co-authors who designed the study.

“There’s a common perception that you trawl the bottom and the ecosystem is destroyed,” Hilborn said. “This study shows that the most common kind of trawling, otter trawling, does not destroy the marine ecosystem, and places that are trawled once a year really won’t be very different from places that are not trawled at all.”

But the study doesn’t let otter trawling completely off the hook.

“We need to view these results in light of the footprint of each of these activities,” Hilborn added. “While otter trawling has the least impact per trawl pass, it is the most widely used of all the bottom fishing gear types and hence its effects are more widespread than are those of more specialized fishing gears, such as hydraulic dredges.”

The study is one part of a larger effort to catalogue the effects of different types of bottom trawling worldwide, known as the , which Hilborn leads with co-authors Michel Kaiser of Bangor University and Simon Jennings of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas in Denmark. The group is doing other work to estimate how much bottom trawling takes place globally and thus determine the overall effect of bottom disturbance on the seafloor ecosystem. A previously published paper looked at how changes to the seafloor ecosystem affect the populations of fish that people are trying to catch.

Ultimately, the team aims to publish a set of fishing-industry “best practices” for the methods, equipment, density and frequency of bottom trawling.

The authors were unsurprised to find that otter trawling techniques are less destructive than hydraulic dredges. Similar findings came before, including a led by Kaiser, but that one looked at a smaller number of trawling studies. The authors since developed a scrupulous protocol and cast a wide net for the studies included in the current meta-analysis.

“This one is therefore somewhat bulletproof to the criticism that you have been choosing the studies,” Hilborn said. “Understanding how gear impacts the bottom, and species on the bottom, is important for a scientific understanding of the impacts of trawling.”

The project was initially jointly funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Additional funding came from industry groups, including the Alaska Seafoods Cooperative; American Seafoods Group; Blumar Seafoods Denmark; Clearwater Seafoods; Espersen Group; Glacier Fish Company LLC; Gortons Inc.; Independent Fisheries Ltd., New Zealand; Nippon Suisan (USA), Inc.; Pacific Andes International Holdings, LLC.; Pesca Chiles, South Africa; San Arawa, South Africa; Sanford Ltd., New Zealand; Sealord Group Ltd., New Zealand; South African Trawling Association; and Trident Seafoods. Government funding for the study was supplied by the U.K. Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; the European Union; the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea Science Fund; and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Other co-authors are Marija Sciberras, Claire Szostek and Kathryn Hughes at Bangor University; Nick Ellis, Roland Pitcher and Tessa Mazor at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia; Adriaan Rijnsdorp at the Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies in the Netherlands; Robert McConnaughey at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle; Ana Parma at the Centro Nacional Patagonico in Argentina; and Petri Suuronen at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

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For more information, contact Hilborn at rayh@uw.edu and Hiddink at j.hiddink@bangor.ac.uk or +441248382864.

Parts of this article were adapted from a Bangor University .

These , published Jan. 16 in Nature Communications, draw upon 34 years of data collected in more than 100 fishing communities in Alaska that depend on fishing for livelihoods, cultural traditions and daily subsistence. The 91̽�� researchers found that communities that fished for many different species and had the ability to shift what they harvested, and when, were more resilient to unpredictable downturns in fish abundance and market prices than communities that put all their effort into only a few fisheries.

“This study is about starting the conversation about how communities can buffer themselves against unpredictable ecosystem changes in the future,” said lead author , a doctoral student in the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “There is no reason why any community in the world that depends on renewable resources could not benefit from this approach.”

In their analysis, the researchers used common financial principles to illustrate how fishing communities can buffer against market and ecosystem shifts. Maintaining a diverse portfolio of fishing permits, for example, ensures that a community can switch to halibut or Dungeness crab if salmon take a turn for the worse. Just like with financial stocks, each fishery might not deliver at the same time, but that diversity allows for stability in the long run.

“Human systems can collapse if they have no ability to roll with the punches and adapt when ecosystems re-express themselves,” said co-author , a 91̽��professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. “This analysis shows that the communities that did not suffer from oceanic regime shifts were those that could adapt to changes in the quantity and composition of natural resources.”

The researchers looked specifically at the average fishing revenue in 106 Alaskan communities for 10 years before and after 1989, a year when the North Pacific Ocean experienced a significant shift in productivity and abrupt changes in the composition of marine food webs, while at the same time the global price for salmon dropped because of competition from farm-raised fish.

Commercial fishing in Alaska provides $1.3 billion in annual income from harvest alone, and in some remote areas fishing is the only major industry.

Many Alaskan communities lost more than half of their revenue following 1989. However, the researchers found that communities with the highest level of diversity in what they fished for saw little or no change in revenue. Specifically, communities that had high diversity were able to shift to different fisheries after 1989, and some even increased their revenue streams by leveraging new and emerging fish markets.

“We found that well-diversified communities also had higher turnover, or the ability to go out and fish for species that are more abundant while relying less on those that declined,” Cline said. “If you are diversified, it’s just a matter of focusing on fisheries that are more abundant or more valuable, and if you’re not diversified, that means adapting your portfolio by selling what you had and buying something new.”

The authors recognize this can be difficult for individual fishermen ― fishing permits are expensive and can be hard to obtain. When dispersed across the community level, however, individuals could still specialize, but differently from their neighbor. For example, one subset could fish for pink salmon, while another tackles halibut or Dungeness crab. Revenues from these efforts are felt throughout the community.

Additionally, this approach promotes a powerful shared identity, the authors explain.

“There’s intrinsic value in the identity of being a fishing community,” Schindler said. “That sense of community identity is basically reinforced by the fact that the community is adapting to the ecosystem, which is always changing.”

The rich dataset used in this analysis, provided by the Alaska Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission, was invaluable in allowing the researchers to test concepts of diversification and turnover ― switching to catch more abundant fish ― which have been put forth in other papers as ways of managing human interactions with natural resources.

These principles could be applied to fisheries around the world, and many small fishing communities already diversify naturally, the authors explained. Traditional science tends to emphasize gathering data to make better predictions of how natural resources will fare, but perhaps that isn’t the best approach when managing resources in a highly variable and unpredictable environment, they argue.

“With ongoing climate change, population growth and ocean acidification, the question is, what’s the future going to look like? We should expect the unexpected,” Schindler said. “Then the question becomes, what can we do to develop resilient communities for what is guaranteed to be an unexpected new future?”

“While 40 years ago most fishermen were generalists, and switched between fish stocks as they fluctuated, the efforts to reduce overall fishing effort has generally forced fishermen to specialize in a small number of fisheries, said co-author , a 91̽��professor in aquatic and fishery sciences. “We need to explore ways to allow flexibility while still restraining the total catch.”

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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For more information, contact Cline at tjcline@uw.edu and Schindler at deschind@uw.edu or 206-616-6724.

Grant number: CNH #1114918

The paper shows that, among 28 of the world’s major fishing nations, there is wide variation in the effectiveness of fisheries management systems at meeting their objectives for productive fish populations. The authors considered several aspects of management systems and three elements seem to be critical to their success.

“Fisheries management systems are complex, with an incredible variety of tools and strategies used around the world, but this research shows the most successful systems consistently have a few management attributes in common,” said lead author , a research scientist in the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “There is no silver bullet in fisheries management, but three attributes were consistently associated with positive outcomes: science-based stock assessments, limits on fishing pressure and adequate enforcement of those limits.”

According to the paper, these three attributes were more important for productive fish and shellfish populations than the 10 other attributes they also considered, such as protecting sensitive habitats or collecting data on catch or body size. The analysis included the world’s largest and most valuable fisheries and also some smaller ones.

“This is the first global assessment of how individual fish stocks are managed, and by collecting data at the individual fishery level we were able to identify what was key to success,” said co-author , a 91̽��professor of aquatic and fishery sciences.

The study relies on expert surveys from 182 fisheries scientists, managers, academics, industry members and environmental NGOs around the world. Survey respondents provided information fishery by fishery, covering aspects of research, management, enforcement and socioeconomics as well as measures of the current state and trends in fish abundance and fishing pressure. The researchers combined this information to produce an overall measure of how effective national fisheries management systems are at meeting their objectives and, in turn, how this affects fish populations.

“There are very few tools available to the field to benchmark the quality of fisheries management across countries,” said Matthew Elliott, a co-author and principal with California Environmental Associates. “This survey takes an important step toward creating such a tool that can help compare not just the state of stocks but also the nature of management.”

The authors suggest this survey can be used to evaluate the success of fisheries management systems, either for individual fisheries or across countries, and can be used to track future improvements in fisheries management.

“To date, good fisheries management has been summed up by the maxim, ‘you’ll know it when you see it.’ Yet, timely information on the nature or quality of fisheries management across countries has been lacking,” said Emily Peterson, a co-author and senior associate with California Environmental Associates. “This study provides a novel contribution by characterizing the status of fisheries management in the world’s largest fishing nations.”

The research shows that countries with depleted or declining fish populations often tend to be the ones that also have less-developed fishery management systems. This study suggests these countries have the greatest potential for improving the status of their fish populations, particularly by setting fishing limits based on stock assessments and adequately enforcing those limits.

“When fish population abundance declines, monetary subsidies to fishing fleets sometimes result in too many boats chasing too few fish. If these funds were instead directed into key components of fisheries management systems, that would improve the status of fish populations and the food they can sustainably provide for humans, especially in developing countries,” said Melnychuk.

The work was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

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For more information, contact Melnychuk at mmel@uw.edu or 604-817-9987.

In a three-page published this week in the journal Nature, he argues that this increasingly popular conservation strategy is not as effective as properly managing recreational and commercial fisheries.

“There’s this idea that the only way you can protect the ocean is by permanently closing parts of the ocean to fishing, with no-take areas,” said , a professor in the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “You protect biodiversity better by regulating fisheries over the country’s entire economic zone.”

Marine protected areas have grown in popularity since the early 2000s. Recent examples include an area twice the size of Texas in the established in 2014 by President Barack Obama, and a to close 25 percent of the Seychelles’ exclusive economic zone, an island nation off Africa’s east coast.

Several environmental organizations have set a larger goal of making by the year 2030. But Hilborn believes this is not the best way to protect global marine ecosystems.

“If the problem is overfishing or bycatch, then fisheries management is much more effective than establishing MPAs because you regulate the catch over the entire economic zone,” Hilborn said. “I don’t see how anyone can defend MPAs as a better method than fisheries management, except in places where you just can’t do management.”

In countries with functioning fisheries management systems, Hilborn believes, conservationists and the fishing industry should work together on large-scale protection of marine biodiversity and sensitive marine habitats.

For example, changes in fishing practices that allowed “dolphin-safe tuna” have cut dolphin deaths in the eastern Pacific by almost 100 times between 1986 and 1998, the article notes.

“You could never have reduced dolphin deaths that much by simply closing part of the ocean to fishing,” Hilborn said.

He argues that working with the fishing industry to modify what types of gear are used and when and where different species are allowed to be caught can make more of a difference than establishing new marine protected areas.

“In Alaska, for example, more than 50 percent of the continental shelf waters are closed to specific kinds of fishing gear and the entire shelf is covered by species-specific catch restrictions,” he writes. “This is much more protection than could be offered by turning 30 percent of the region into MPAs.”

Hilborn said he worries that marine protected areas are being created without specific objectives, without input from affected communities, and without analysis of the larger-scale effects. Closing one area to fishing will just shift the pressure to a different area, Hilborn said, or cause people to seek other, more environmentally harmful sources of food.

In early September, world leaders will meet in Hawaii for the high-profile , held every four years by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Hilborn hopes his article will prompt discussion about priorities for preserving the health of marine environments.

“The modern conservation movement places too much emphasis on protected areas,” Hilborn said. “The focus needs to shift. We can better protect biodiversity, and still provide food, by looking to fisheries management as the first defense.”

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For more information, contact Hilborn at rayh@uw.edu or 206-543-3587.

The award is given to Hilborn by the World Council of Fisheries Societies’ International Fisheries Science Prize Committee in recognition of his 40-year career of “highly diversified research and publication in support of global fisheries science and conservation,” according to a .

For Hilborn, who has received numerous awards for his research — including the and the Ecological Society of America’s — this recognition is particularly significant because it comes from other experts in fisheries science.

“It’s very gratifying in that it is experts in fisheries that are doing the evaluation and selection for this award,” Hilborn said.

As part of his award, Hilborn will give a May 27 about how to sustain fisheries in the future by building on management success stories.

“We know how to sustainably manage large fisheries in rich countries. But the real challenge is those approaches won’t work for small-scale fisheries around the world or in countries that don’t have the wealth or governance that we do,” he said.

Hilborn’s research and teaching at the 91̽��is in natural resource management and conservation. He has authored several books, including “,” and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles. He is a fellow of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The World Fisheries Congress meets every four years in different locations, bringing together fisheries scientists from academic institutions and nongovernmental organizations. This is the seventh meeting; the first took place in Athens, Greece, in 1992.

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For more information, contact Hilborn at rayh@uw.edu.